Table Of ContentEgon
SCHIELE
Authors: Esther Selsdon and Jeanette Zwingerberger
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Contents
5 His Life
53 His Work
154 Biography
155 Index of Works
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His Life
In 1964, Oskar Kokoschka evaluated the first great Schiele Exhibition in London as
“pornographic”. In the age of discovery of modern art and loss of “subject”, Schiele
responded that for him there existed no modernity, only the “eternal”. Schiele’s world
shrank into portraits of the body, locally and temporally non-committal. Self-discovery is
expressed in an unrelenting revelation of himself as well as of his models. The German art
encyclopedia, compiled by Thieme and Becker, described Schiele as an eroticist because
Schiele’s art is an erotic portrayal of the human body. Futhermore, Schiele studied both
male and female bodies. His models express an incredible freedom with respect to their own
sexuality, self-love, homosexuality or voyeurism, as well as skillfully seducing the viewer.
For Schiele, the clichéd ideas of feminine beauty did not interest him. He knew that the
urge to look is interconnected with the mechanisms of disgust and allure. The body
contains the power of sex and death within itself. The photograph of Schiele on his
deathbed (p.6), depicts the twenty-eight year old looking asleep, his gaunt body is
completely emaciated, his head resting on his bent arm; the similarity to his drawings is
astounding. Because of the danger of infection, his last visitors were able to communicate
with the Spanish flu-infected Schiele only by way of a mirror, which was set up on the
threshold between his room and the parlour.
During the same year, 1918, Schiele had designed a mausoleum for himself and his wife. Did
he know, he who had so often distinguished himself as a person of foresight, of his nearing
death? Did his individual fate fuse collectively with the fall of the old system, that of the
Habsburg Empire? Schiele’s productive life scarcely extended beyond ten years, yet during
this time he produced 334 oil paintings and 2,503 drawings (Jane Kallir, New York. 1990).
He painted portraits and still-lifes land and townscapes; however, he became famous for
his draftsmanship. While Sigmund Freud exposed the repressed pleasure principles of
upper-class Viennese society, which put its women into corsets and bulging gowns and
granted them solely a role as future mothers, Schiele bares his models. His nude studies
penetrate brutally into the privacy of his models and finally confront the viewer with his
or her own sexuality.
Schiele’s Childhood
In modern industrial times, with the noise of racing steam engines and factories and the
human masses working in them, Egon Schiele was born in the railway station hall of Tulln,
a small, lower Austrian town on the Danube on June 12, 1890. After his older sisters
Melanie (1886-1974) and Elvira (1883-1893), he was the third child of the railway director
Adolf Eugen (1850-1905) and his wife Marie, née Soukoup (1862-1935). The shadows of
1. Self-Portrait Pulling Cheek, 1910. three male stillbirths were a precursor for the only boy, who in his third year of life would
Gouache, watercolour and lose his ten-year-old sister Elvira. The high infant mortality rate was the lot of former times,
pencil, 44.3 x 30.5 cm. a fate which Schiele’s later work and his pictures of women would characterize. In 1900, he
Graphische Sammlung attended the grammar school in Krems. But he was a poor pupil, who constantly took
Albertina, Vienna. refuge in his drawings, which his enraged father burned.
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2. Schiele on his deathbed, 1918.
3. Photograph by Anton Josef
Trèka, Egon Schiele, 1914.
Graphische Sammlung
Albertina, Vienna.
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In 1902, Schiele’s father sent his son to the regional grammar and upper secondary school
in Klosterneuburg. The young Schiele had a difficult childhood marked by his father’s ill
health. He suffered from syphilis, which, according to family chronicles, he is said to have
contracted while on his honeymoon as a result of a visit to a bordello in Triest. His wife fled
from the bedroom during the wedding night and the marriage was only consummated on
the fourth day, on which he infected her also. Despair characterized Schiele’s father, who,
retired early sat at home dressed in his service uniform in a state of mental confusion. In the
summer of 1904, stricken by increasing paralysis, he tried to throw himself out of a window.
He finally died after a long period of suffering on New Year’s Day 1905. The father, who
during a fit of insanity burned all his railroad stocks, left his wife and children destitute. An
uncle, Leopold Czihaczek, chief inspector of the imperial and royal railway, assumed joint
custody of the fifteen-year-old Egon, for whom he planned the traditional family role of
railroad worker. During this time, young Schiele wore second-hand clothing handed down
from his uncle and stiff white collars made from paper. It seems that Schiele had been very
close to his father for he, too, had possessed a certain talent for drawing, had collected
butterflies and minerals and was drawn to the natural world.
Years later, Schiele wrote to his sister: “I have, in fact, experienced a beautiful spiritual
occurrence today, I was awake, yet spellbound by a ghost who presented himself to me in a
dream before waking, so long as he spoke with me, I was rigid and speechless.” Unable to
accept the death of his father, Schiele let him rise again in visions. He reported that his
father had been with him and spoken to him at length. In contrast, distance and
misunderstanding characterized his relationship with his mother who, living in dire
financial straits, expected her son to support her; in return, the older sister would work for
the railroad.
However, Schiele, who had been pampered by women during childhood, claimed to be
“aneternal child”. By a stroke of fate, the painter Karl Ludwig Strauch (1875-1959),
instructed the gifted youth in draftsmanship; the artist Max Kahrer of Klosterneuburg
looked after the boy as well. In 1906, at the age of only sixteen, Schiele passed the entrance
examination for the general art class at the Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna on his first
attempt. Even the strict uncle, in whose household Schiele now took his midday meals, sent
a telegram to Schiele’s mother: “Passed”.
The Favourite Sister, Gerti
The nude study of the fiery redhead with the small belly, fleshy bosom and tousled pubic
hair is his younger sister Gertrude (1894-1981). In another watercolour, Gerti reclines
backwards, still fully clothed with black stockings and shoes, and lifts the black hem of her
dress from under which the red orifice of her body gapes. Schiele draws no bed, no chair,
only the provocative gesture of his sister’s body offering itself. Incestuous fantasies? The
sister, four years his junior, was a compliant subject for him.
At the same time as Sigmund Freud discovered that self-discovery occurs by way of erotic
experiences, and the urge to look emerges as a spontaneous sexual expression within the
child, young Egon recorded confrontations with the opposite sex on paper. He incorporated
erotic games of discovery and shows an unabashed interest in the genitalia of his model into
his nude studies. The forbidden gaze, searching for the opened female vagina beneath the
rustling of the skirt hem and white lace. Gerti with her freckled skin, the green eyes and red
hair is the prototype of all the later women and models of Schiele.
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4. Portrait of Leopold Czihaczek,
Standing, 1907.
Oil on canvas, 149.8 x 49.7 cm.
Private collection.
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